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This article aims at emphasizing the crucial importance that procreation has in phantasies about primal scene and the ‘ominous’ number 13.
The primal scene is mostly represented as a trauma in the sense of arousing a tremendous jealousy in the child. This is right, of course … inasmuch as phantasies of procreation are not a conspicuous part of the situation.
Insofar as the primal scene implies no more than parental intercourse, the child is really a third person excluded from intimacy between parents. But if the scene is referred to the begetting of a new baby, then the child is no more the third, but, in a sense, the fourth one excluded. In other words, a dangerous fight begins between the child and the supposed newcomer as to which of them will be the object of parents' love, or which of them will survive. We then could say that the primal scene represents the classical oedipal triangle only inasmuch as the fateful theme of procreation is not implied. Otherwise - and this must happen in most occasions - the triangle becomes a quadrilateral.
The number 13, so important - as an ominous one - in popular superstitions, may illustrate the present assertion. Primal scene is mostly presented as a triangle: the child and his (or her) parents (1 and 2, respectively). The parents being a couple, the whole situation could be represented by the number 1,2 (12). But since the parents begetting a new child is a decisive phantasy (and partly a most realistic fear) of the child, 1,2 becomes 1,3 (13).
But number 13 has still another vital sense, this time